Netanyahu Is Reserving Likud Slots Faster Than His Bloc Is Gaining Seats in the Polls

The Jerusalem Post reports that between reserved slots and other reservations, Netanyahu will control 11 of the top 29 positions on Likud’s next Knesset list — a party that currently holds 32 seats and is polling at an average of 23 to 24, which means a significant number of sitting Likud MKs will not return after the 27 October election. Haaretz’s Noa Shpigel reported on 11 August that Likud had announced overnight that Netanyahu asked the party secretariat to approve three reserved slots, including one for Defence Minister Israel Katz, on the stated grounds that security duties would prevent him campaigning; an internal party poll had put Katz at the 19th slot. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Central Committee chairman Haim Katz were also secured. One Likud source told Haaretz, anonymously: “This doesn’t look good.” On 12 August, Haaretz reported Netanyahu had changed party rules so that Deputy Minister Almog Cohen, announcing his departure from Otzma Yehudit on X, could run in the primary.

The primary itself keeps moving. Times of Israel reporting in late June had it set for 4 August; a Likud primaries conference was held in Ashdod on 10 August; the Israel Policy Forum’s 120 Project tracker reports the Likud central court struck down a proposal to open district seats to current representatives and that rumours circulated of a third delay, to 30 August. Against that, the Center for Israel Education’s roundup of surveys for the month ending 31 July put the Likud, ultra-Orthodox and far-right bloc at 49 to 52 seats against the 61 required — an aggregator’s synthesis of multiple polls, not one survey. Haaretz columnist Joshua Leifer, on the Haaretz Podcast of 10 August: “The minute that Netanyahu’s stock seems weak, people will start selling it, and that has begun to happen.”

Assessment: Reserved slots are what a leader buys when he cannot deliver seats. Each reservation converts a colleague’s electoral risk into a personal debt to Netanyahu, and the price is a cohort of displaced MKs whom the Jerusalem Post describes as embittered and fighting for their careers — the natural raw material for the new right-wing micro-parties now being courted. Two cautions for readers of the Israeli press this autumn. The polling numbers circulating are aggregations, and aggregations of stagnant polls will conceal movement in the personal-standing figures that actually drive defections. And a primary postponed twice is not yet a primary; write nothing about a Likud list until one exists.